Tickled

I'm a pretty easily amused person. And there are times when I laugh, and then there are times when I laugh. When something just tickles me, I will sometimes laugh for quite a while, and the longer I keep going... the worse it'll get. My family knows this and will sometimes exploit it by egging me on till I turn beet red and gasp for breath. I believe the last time this happened I was watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail with my brother. My lord that movie makes me laugh every time.

Today I had one of those tickled moments. It wasn't even funny -- I think it was a combination of complete boredom and dislike for my teacher. Yes, I was in class. Differential equations, to be specific. The teacher was doing some long problem and at some point integrated sin/cos using substitutions. I, as usual, was bored out of my mind and sitting in the back corner of the room. Someone raised their hand and asked why he didn't just integrate it as tan. The teacher (who has probably lived in America 30 years but has yet to master our language) then gave a spill about how then you'd have to know the formula for integrating tan -- and at some point he posed the rhetorical "what's the integral of tan?" and without missing a step the student spit the formula right out.

And in that pretty silent moment just after, I said way too loudly (as usual) "well, he sure knew that" and I just cracked up. I know it's not that funny -- but something about it just tickled me. And I just could not stop laughing about it. I'd think I was done... and then just crack up all over again.